Or maybe Mao trying to exterminate sparrows. This is just bonkers (boldface mine):

Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive amounts of water from Kaweah and Success lakes.

Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night.

Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs.

Those levels were last seen, and surpassed, during the 2023 floods, which destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and caused significant damage to infrastructure.

“We were able to get them to back off that,” said Eric Limas, General Manager of the Lower Tule River and Pixley irrigation districts, of the Army Corps. “They’ll still be releasing water sometime tonight, but it will be a smaller amount, which will increase tomorrow.”

…Some people interviewed for this story speculated that the move was political on the part of the new administration, a kind of water “flex,” but declined to elaborate…

But the Army Corps typically works with downstream agricultural users to allow them to keep a bit more water in the lakes to hedge against dry years, such this one is shaping up to be.

Kaweah River Water Master Victor Hernandez said Lake Kaweah’s winter capacity is 12,000 acre feet, but had been allowed to go up to 39,000 acre feet after an aerial snow survey showed the watershed currently only has another 45,000 acre feet in snow cover.

“Even if everything came down at once, it would only be enough to fill the reservoir halfway,” he said. “We were on track with the Corps working with the models and forecasts and doing our planning and then I get a call at 2:15 p.m. telling me they were going to channel capacity.”

It’s clear Trump’s babbling about how he turned the water on for southern California to fight the forest fires led to this. Mind you, water is still being wasted by this policy–no one will be able to use this water.

We’re going to have four years of this, and this didn’t need to happen.